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President of the Texas Medical Board Dr. Sherif Zaafran, speaks during a board meeting in Austin on Mar. 22, 2024.The Texas Medical Board on Friday adopted guidance for how doctors should interpret the state’s new abortion laws, reducing paperwork requirements some saw as overly burdensome but declining to provide a list of cases in which an abortion would be legal.
“There is nothing that prevents a prosecutor in an individual county or an individual who wants to file a lawsuit to do so,” Zaafran said. “But my hope would be, and my strong recommendation would be, that any entities out there would defer to the actions of the medical board and its judgment when a complaint has come in as to whether something was appropriate or not.
While some advocates initially hoped the board would issue a non-exclusive list of conditions that would qualify for an abortion, the board rejected that request. The new guidance removes some of the documentation requirements, and says doctors should create this documentation within seven days of performing an abortion. It also eliminated the provision that said doctors should document whether they tried to transfer a patient to avoid performing an abortion.LuAnn Morgan, one of the non-physician members of the board, raised concerns that this guidance didn’t go far enough to ensure doctors felt safe treating patients.
In that ruling, the court said the legal standard to bring a case against someone who performed an abortion is that no reasonable physician would have said terminating a pregnancy was medically necessary.
Texas Medical Board Abortions Abortion Rights Reproductive Rights Womens Health
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